Piaget at Watches & Wonders: purity and perfection

Piaget are wrapping up a remarkable year of new models, one that began with the thinnest manual-wind watch yet, and has blossomed into a veritable smorgasbord of bejewelled and ultra-slim beauties.

The thinnest watch we’ve seen launched in January as a men’s model, the Altiplano 900P (pictured above), a timepiece just 3.65mm thin. This was something achieved by combining the movement and the case into one.

The Altiplano has now morphed into the thinnest of high-jewellery watches, with Piaget going so far as to add, in one variation, 367 baguette-cut and brilliant-cut diamonds totalling 4.7 carats, some feat given the tiny acreage of the 38mm watch.

A wafer of time

Despite being a wafer-thin 5.65mm, it’s heavyweight competition for other creations – from tourbillons to skeletonised triumphs – that the brand revealed in October at Hong Kong’s Watches and Wonders.

Pure Piaget, the enamelled 1200E.

These included the only slightly less-thin Altiplano 1200E, a watch boasting the first ever entirely enamelled skeleton movement, one that has a depth of just 3mm. The enamelling, your choice of black or white, is applied to the gold mainplate and undergoes five successive firings at between 780 and 800 degrees celcius – a delicate feat given the need to avoid distortion of that already slender base.

Only a few weeks before, Piaget created a special collection of jewellery and timepieces for the Paris Antique Dealers Biennale, labelling it “Extremely Piaget.” That description, refreshingly, looks like no exaggeration – this is a brand producing wrist adornments that reflect extremes of craftsmanship and endeavour.